Ellison, in a conference call following Oracle’s quarterly earnings, agreed with many Wall Street analysts that H-P overpaid for the British software company.

“Autonomy was shopped to us,” Ellison said. “We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.”

Ellison also argued that Autonomy’s technology–which helps customers sift through unstructured information, like emails, text documents and videos–is something Oracle can offer, too, and is better incorporated into its databases than sold as standalone software.

Those remarks, Lynch said in an interview Tuesday, gave away the fact that Ellison’s “understanding of the problems in the unstructured world is very weak.”

Customers, Lynch said, don’t want to move their emails and other unstructured data into an Oracle database before they can analyze it. “You have a whole new model, about the stuff being managed in place and understood where it is,” he said.

Lynch also flatly rejected the idea that Autonomy was shopped to Oracle, though he can entirely exclude the possibility that some investment banker threw out its name among other possible buyout candidates for Oracle.

“If some bank happened to come with us on a list, that is nothing to do with us,” Lynch said. Ellison’s remarks on the point are “just inaccurate.”

Lynch argued that H-P can make an impressive return on the Autonomy investment in a variety of ways, including selling its software through H-P’s bigger sales force, offering consulting services associated with Autonomy’s technology and developing appliance-style combinations of hardware and Autonomy software.

Besides Autonomy’s direct sales to customers, other software companies–including Oracle–have built products that incorporate Autonomy’s technology, Lynch said, a practice that will continue after H-P controls the software. “We have most of the software industry running Autonomy,” he said.

For any company hoping to have an impact in the unstructured-data business, “there’s no obvious No. 2 asset you can buy,” Lynch said.

The proposed acquisition should be completed “reasonably quickly,” Lynch said, adding that he didn’t expect H-P’s recent CEO change to have any impact on the deal.

H-P last week fired CEO Leo Apotheker and elevated Meg Whitman from the board of directors to take his place. Lynch said he’s spoken with Whitman and Ray Lane, H-P’s chairman, several times and he hasn’t picked up on any deviation from the strategy put together by Apotheker.

Lynch said he will report to Whitman as the leader of a new unit, known as the information management division.